Ravikant, Kamal - Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It

Step 2: Stand in front of a mirror, nose a few inches away. Relax. Breathe.

Step 3: Look into your eyes. Helps if you focus on one. Your left eye. Don't panic, it's only you. Relax. Breathe slowly, naturally, until you develop a rhythm.

Step 4: Looking into your left eye, say, "I love myself." Whether you believe it that moment or not isn't important. What's important is you saying it to yourself, looking into your eyes, where there is no escape from the truth. And ultimately, the truth is loving yourself.

Step 5: Repeat "I love myself" gently, pausing occasionally to watch your eyes.

When the five minutes are up, smile. You've just communicated the truth to yourself in a deep, visceral way. In a way the mind cannot escape.

If anyone ever looked in your eyes, knowing that you loved them, this is what they saw. Give yourself the same gift.

Love and memory

Memory is not set in stone. Any neuroscientist will tell you that. The more you remember something, especially if it's emotionally charged, the more you will reinforce the pathways connecting the neurons. Simply put, the more you think about it, the more you feel it, the stronger the memory.

Here's the interesting part. It's not just the act of recall that strengthens a memory, another factor shapes and even changes it - the state of mind you are in when remembering something.

The implications of this are transformative.

Take a random experience, a relationship that ended years ago. Consciously recall it when you're miserable. You'll naturally find yourself focusing on the negative parts, and those will grow stronger in memory.

Conversely, same exact experience, but recall when you're happy. Notice the change?

It's still the same experience, it's still your mind. But the filter is different. And the filter shifts the focus, which subtly changes the memory. More importantly, it changes how the memory makes you feel, the power it has over you.

There's a solution here, a powerful one.

If a painful memory arises, don't fight it or try to push it away - you're in quicksand. Struggle reinforces pain. Instead, go to love. Love for yourself. Feel it. If you have to fake it, fine. It'll become real eventually. Feel the love for yourself as the memory ebbs and flows. That will take the power away.

And, even more importantly, it will shift the wiring of the memory. Do it again and again. Love. Re-wire. Love. Re-wire. It's your mind. You can do whatever you want.

Change

"It's happening,"

"Yes."

"Really happening."

I nod slowly, grin.

"Unbelievable," she says. "Unbelievable."

Through the window, the Sierras below, mountains of earthy brown. Daybreak ahead. A clear morning. This high up, no human could survive, yet we hurtle forward at hundreds of knots in an aluminum tube, comfy in our chairs, sipping our sodas.

"Are you sca-" She rests her hand gently on my arm. "Nervous?"

I look out for a moment, the land below already flattening, then to her. "Nope."

"I don't know how you can do that. Me, I'm a bucket of nerves."

"But this is magic," I say. "Why be nervous, that's not doing any good."

"I know that," she says. "I do, really. But tell that to my nerves."

"I think," I say, "I think that I'm starting to accept the magic, that life can be this way, that fantastic experiences, things I couldn't imagine within my reach are possible, are happening, will happen. That's what it is."

She smiles, squeezes my arm, then leans into my shoulder. She closes her eyes. I reach down and kiss her head softly, smelling her hair, then return to the window.

Patchwork of browns and greens below. How fast the land's changed. How fast everything changes.

Light switches

Richard Bandler, co-founder of NLP, got known early in his career as someone who could cure schizophrenics within hours. He started getting called by doctors and patients' families to go to mental institutions, work with the worst cases, the ones everyone had given up on.

One of his favorite stories is about an executive who started hallucinating snakes. No one could convince him otherwise. He was committed, received treatment, no luck. So, he was strapped to his bed - not very empowering when you believe snakes are crawling all over you - in the mental hospital and chalked off as one of the incurable ones.

By the time Bandler met him, he was in bad shape. To figure out what to do, Bandler went for a walk in town. He needed to snap this guy back to reality. He passed a pet store and noticed a barrel full of rubber snakes on the curb. He went inside, asked the man behind the counter if he could rent the entire barrel for a few hours.

"They're for sale," the man said. "I don't rent the whole barrel."

"I need them," Bandler said, "all. But only for a few hours."

"Why?"

"I’m going to cure schizophrenia," Bandler said.

"Cool," the man said.

Bandler chalks it up to the fact that since the store owner wasn't a doctor, his mind was open to cures that were out of the norm. Turns out he also had a few well-trained snakes - two cobras and one giant python that loved wrapping herself around humans. Perfect.

The store owner and Bandler returned to the mental hospital, bags full of rubber snakes and three real ones, went to the shower where the patient bathed, and covered the place with them. The live cobras, he put extra close to where the patient would be. The python, right above where he'd position the wheelchair. Finished, he surveyed his work.

It reminded him of the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones descends into a chamber full of writhing snakes. Enough to scare anyone, let alone a person with heightened snake phobia.

Keep in mind, Bandler once cured a guy who thought he was Jesus by bringing in three muscular football players dressed as Roman Centurions and wood for a life-size cross into his hospital room. Then, he proceeded to nail the cross together, pausing occasionally to measure the guy as the Centurions held him down. By the time they were ready for the crucifixion, the man was convinced he wasn't Jesus. Even after the drama had passed, the cure stuck.

The snake owner and doctor stood behind the one-way glass to the shower. Bandler brought the man in, strapped tight in his wheelchair. The moment the man saw the snakes, he started screaming, "Snakes!" It was a terrible sound, Bandler says, from the very depths of the man, carrying throughout the hospital, "Snaaaaaakes!" But he positioned the man right where he could see the cobras in front and the python dangling above. Then he left and shut the door behind him.

The man screamed and screamed. Bandler waited. Finally, he went in. The man saw him, was about to scream, but Bandler cut him off.

"Snakes snakes, yes I know," Bandler said. "Tell me which ones are real and which ones aren't, and I'll wheel you out. Otherwise, I'm leaving you in here." Then he turned to go.

"Rubber snakes," the man said, motioning to the ground with his head. "Hallucinated snakes," he motioned around. Then, eyes up at the python dangling a few feet above, dropping closer, "real snake!"

This caught Bandler off guard. The man, when put to the test, was not only lucid enough to distinguish real from hallucinated, he could even tell which ones were rubber - something even Bandler had a hard time telling, given how realistic they were.

He wheeled the man out and asked him how he could tell hallucinated versus real.

"Easy," the man said, "hallucinated snakes are see-through."

The man had known all along. Reality was solid, hallucinations were see-through. But his fear was so intense, he'd lost touch with reality. Bandler taught the man to focus on the difference between reality and hallucinated see-through snakes and the man was cured. He still saw hallucinated snakes occasionally, but knew that they were not real. The power they had over him was gone.